DSi Gets Mixed Messages

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Vicarious Visions brings an experimental multiplayer game to the new handheld.

By Craig Harris

Vicarious Visions has been at the forefront of the Nintendo handhelds all the way back in the days of the Game Boy Color. When the Game Boy Advance launched in the US, the development team did everything it could to be there on the ground floor with the platform: Vicarious Visions' GBA version of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is still considered one of the handheld's finest moments. When the Nintendo DS launched, VV was there on Day One with Spider-Man 2, and the day Nintendo flipped the switch on the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service for the DS, the team had the first online third-party game available: Tony Hawk's American Sk8land.

So, it's not surprising to find out that, with the Nintendo DSi finally available in the US, Vicarious Visions has been working in the background to have one of the first third-party DSiWare titles available in the system's launch window. The game is called Mixed Messages, a unique multiplayer-only experience that really could only work as a DSiWare title.

"Mixed Messages has been a passion project at Vicarious Visions," Karthik Bala, CEO of Vicarious Visions told us. "The original idea and prototype was developed about two years ago. What started out as a little tinkering and game design idea quickly turned into a huge time sink, as people started playing it all the time."

In preparation for the game's launch, the developer gave us an early look at the game just a few weeks ago. Mixed Messages is a variation of the "telephone" party game where participants whisper a phrase down the line of multiple people. The idea: type up a sentence, as simple or as complex as you want. When you've finished writing, you hand the system over to the second player, whose job is to draw a picture based on that sentence. When the drawing's complete, player three is up, who will have to look at the picture and try to come up with a sentence that explains what's going on. This chain will go on and on, alternating pictures and sentences – the more players involved, the crazier the final product will get.

"We had an internal site that had dozens of game sessions posted and it was just hilarious to read – and even more fun playing it at lunch time or when were out to dinner," said Karthik. "So it seemed like it would be great if we could share it with the world."

When Vicarious Visions prepared to bring Mixed Messages to the world, the risky design made it a hard sell. "We took it to Activision and Nintendo and everyone loved it," Karthik said. "But the big problem was that although the game itself was pretty small in terms of file size, it really needed a lot of rewriteable flash memory to store all the save games. There was no cartridge available at the time for Nintendo DS that could support that save game file size the game needed."

Along came Nintendo's new handheld system with its internal storage. "When we started working with the DSi platform it became immediately clear that it's the perfect platform for Mixed Messages," Karthik explained. "DSiWare was the perfect service to get the game out to everyone."

We were a little suspect on the concept, especially when Vicarious Visions revealed to us that the team's first DSi title would be a multiplayer-only game that required passing the system around. Seeing is believing, however, and after a few sessions with five players it was clear that the developer was onto something. It's hard to ignore that there's no single player component to Mixed Messages, but once the design is experienced in a large group of people it's obvious that there's no way to convert the concept in a solitaire mode.

The game does have a very clean interface, something that's important for a title that involves a huge number of people. Before each turn, players can enter their names so that their sentence or picture is easily tracked during the round, and properly labeled when the round is over. Mixed Messages also retains a history of existing players so that when a new round begins, players can simply tap on their name when it's their turn. And it looks like the development team anticipated situations where players might accidentally quit out of the game -- rounds appear to be saved after every turn, and the game retains a history of previous rounds that can be pulled up after they're ended.

Karthik suggests that the more the merrier, and better odds than evens. "Since you take turns alternating writing sentences and drawing pictures, it works the best when you have an odd number of players," he said. "If you have an even number of players, the game auto generates a really funny starter sentence from a database of nouns, verbs and phrases." The game can be set up to have as few as two players and as many as 21.

No release date or price has been revealed just yet, but Mixed Messages is expected to hit the DSi Shop during the "launch window" of the system. Don't be surprised if it shows up for download in the next few weeks.